1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus, a control method therefor, a program, and a storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
There has been an increasing opportunity for forming forms and slips based on data input from a business system that is constructed on the basis of a legacy system and a database system. On the other hand, the business system is often constructed with no attention to the output forms of forms and slips. Further, in general, after constructing a form system that generates forms and slips by using arbitrary data and output forms as inputs, the interface between the business system and the form system is defined for linking the systems.
Specifically, the interface between the systems is realized by a method of associating the identifiers of data of the business system and those of the fields of form templates of the form system.
By the way, the XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which is capable of handling a plurality of data items as a single object together with data structure thereof, has been more often employed as a format of data input to and output from systems. It has been a common practice to define the interface between the systems, particularly, the data output and input between the systems by making use of information (XML schema) of the structure of XML data, specifically by associating element names with each other. It should be noted that the XML schema is defined as “the set of element names for describing arbitrary data”.
Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2002-108665 discloses as a related art a technique for executing the association of identifiers of user data with the cell numbers of table sheet cells, on a table basis. Further, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2002-99561 discloses a technique for associating the names of XML elements with each other more automatically by using the degree of resemblance of element names as a clue so as to save the trouble of associating them.
Field names are arbitrarily determined by individual users, and generally there are a plurality of form templates that have the same field names. With such a background, it is desired to make the operation of associating the identifiers of data with the field names of form templates as simple as possible.
In the technique disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2002-108665, it is necessary to associate data identifiers with cell numbers (corresponding to field names of form templates) defined by table sheets on a table sheet basis even if the table sheets have fields with the same names. Consequently, there remains the problem of increased time and labor required for the association.
Further, in the technique disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2002-99561, it is apparent that as preconditions of making automatic the association between the element names (corresponding to association between the identifiers of data and the field names of form templates), character strings expected to appear as element names are limited. This causes the problem that the technique cannot be applied to cases where character strings expected to appear are determined on a user basis.